NHL history in a 127 years of bite sized pieces.

[CaptainCrunch]

I'll jump back to this at the start of training camp, after doing 80+ of this, I'm kinda exhausted by it.


I enjoyed doing these, and its been really interesting, and there are stories to be continued in the 2000's. The war in 2004 between the union and the League. The Flames thrilling run to the finals, the Iggy goal pass in the Olympics. The rise of Crosby.


Hopefully these posts don't get lost to the bottom of the pages, I encourage people to keep discussing things, or if someone is ambitious add more or even add a season.

[Steve Bozek]

Many thanks for all your work on this. Enjoyed every summary. You’ve given us another reason to look forward to training camp.

[Jay Random]

Not directly NHL-related, but interesting to hockey history buffs:

I see that today's featured article at Wikipedia is on the legendary Cyclone Taylor, who may have been the biggest star in hockey in the pre-NHL era:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_Taylor

There are many stories about the Cyclone, from his first days as a hockey player in Ottawa to his last years as an elder statesman of hockey in Vancouver. But this is my favourite, from Holzman and Nieforth’s Deceptions and Doublecross:

In 1973, the legendary Toronto Star sportswriter Frank Orr was preparing to interview Cyclone at the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver. Noticing the old guy in the fedora skating on the ice, he asked the Hall of Fame defenceman Babe Pratt who it was. Pratt pointed out that it was Taylor. Orr asked Pratt how many goals he thought Taylor would score in the expanded, sixteen-team NHL.

‘Sixteen to eighteen,’ Pratt replied.

Orr was incredulous. ‘Sixteen to eighteen? Is that it? He was one of the all-time greats.’

‘Yeah, well,’ Pratt replied, ‘you'd have to remember he's eighty-nine years old.’